PayPal Is Launching Its Own U.S. Dollar-Pegged Stablecoin

Gotta love a good paypal headline. Remember folks, paypal started the last bull run and this may be a sign of something more to come paypal to issue dollar pegged stable coin based on Ethereum. It's a pretty big headline. This has been in the works for a while now, reportedly searching back to 2022. So not new news per se, but reportedly they've been working on uh adventuring further into the crypto ecosystem with their own stable coin. And now we're seeing it in partnership with XOs, which was its initial foray into the crypto world in the first place. So really big headline, interesting to see a big fintech provider issuing its own stable coin with Pax. Pretty crazy to see this as you know, paypal went from highly custodial crypto buying and selling service to now issuing its own stable coin on Ethereum. Pretty wild and a lot of responses uh around the crypto community today on this news, Jen, I'm gonna throw it your way. Paypal taking that next step. I guess. I hope this kick starts the next full run because I could use some excitement that doesn't have to do with hacks and exploits. I don't know if it's going to though. But when I read this story, um I just think this is web 2.5 at its finest, right? We talk about people being educated and people understanding what's going on, what we talk about here on the show every day. And I think the best way for that education to happen is by using the product getting out there and like, and playing around. I know we've called it Crypto University uh sometimes on the show and I think that paypal is making that easier. There are so many challenges and roadblocks when you're, when you're playing around with crypto. And so I think that this is really exciting and that when when people are able to use paypal's uh stable coin, they will understand maybe the ins and outs of crypto a little bit better and they'll be able to take that next step and they themselves may be able to progressively decentralize in the way that they, they interact with crypto. So all in all, I think this is a good news story. It reminded me of Visa's announcement. I believe it was in 2021. Visa said that they, I think settled a transaction with us DC and then earlier this year, that conversation came back around. So I hope to hear an update soon on what Visa is doing um around stable coins and I hope that these big financial players playing with stable coins getting into it. Um You know, taking the customer on that progressive decentralization journey will push Congress to finally come to some kind of agreement on a stable coin bill. Those are all my thoughts here, but all in all a great news story, Wendy. What do you think? This is absolutely atrocious. I don't like it one bit. I remember I used to actually be very bullish on getting a staple coin like a, like a CBD C before I um for I did a lot of due diligence and I had quite a few experts on my channel back in like 2019, 2020 right before the Panorama um to kind of talk about it. I was like, this is great. It's gonna be great for mass adoption. I'm super excited, but then I actually started looking into it and seeing what it looks like and seeing what they were doing in other places of the world and different types of control that they can have, how they can resend a transaction, how they could automatically remove money from you, how they could monitor you. So I don't like this. I don't think it's a good idea. Um Unfortunately, it's coming, but I do one of the things that does make me a little bit worried is that they're going to directly compete with us DC. And in my, I, I made some content about it this morning. In my personal opinion, I feel like the public servants are allowing different large entities that I have a lot of control with to create their own stable coins to essentially compete against each other to see which one does better, which has better surveillance and then pick that one to become the ultimate CBD C because it doesn't make sense to me for the United States of America to have multiple different CBD C SI feel like they're gonna need to have one, but I do understand the need for competition, but at the same time, we're gonna take something that's going to actually replace the US dollar. Do we need competition with that? Like how is that going to work? And also it's gonna be Ethereum and that just makes me very, very bullish for my Ethereum bags not selling any time soon. I have one question on your rebuttal there. Wendy paypal can already rescind transactions. They're already doing this. Doesn't this just kind of open up crypto to a broader audience? And, and should they have the concerns that you just mentioned people? Of course, they need to interact with this. Of course, they should. The whole reason why we Bitcoin, why we crypto is because we want to have control of our assets and we don't trust third parties. We always want to make sure that we're custom our own assets. So again, like when you use a third party like paypal or the banks or whatever that is, um it makes me a little bit to, to think about that. I don't want people having control over my money, even my money. That's in a bank when we had the bank runs that were happening and the banking contagion that the public servants blamed on crypto, that was a little bit worrisome to know that more than $250,000 isn't insured. Plus the limited amount of reserves that FDIC actually has for the entire entire, the entire deposits of the United States of America. That is worrisome. I guess I'll zoom out a little bit and say like all staple coins are 3rd, 3rd party issuers, right? Like tether is a big third party issuer that has money sitting in a bank account somewhere uh circle. I mean, it's all like I will say like staple coins are a killer use case, right? Like arguably they're the most killer use case that crypto has brought to bear on the world to date, right? The ability to send money cross borders uh fast, quick, easy, right? And to see paypal take this step saying, hey, we kind of endorse this vision of making pay of making stable coin is a bigger part of how commerce gets done in the world. I think that's a huge signal. I think it's really fascinating to see also that it can be built on Ethereum is also notable. So the idea I think that, you know, I I think the the bigger questions that you're bringing up are certainly relevant to the stable coin conversation. I don't think they're unique to paypal. In this instance. I think paypal just becomes another in a long line of issue. Uh that we've seen here in the past 345 years, wake up and say, oh, wow, stable coins are a great way to zap money around the world in a digitally native environment. Let's do it. Whether it's, you know, B US D work with Pao and issued a similar thing. Now we get to see paypal us D sort of attempt to do something similar. I think it's super fascinating, but I'll toss it back to you any of your thoughts. Um One of my team members just sent me something from the actual um from the coin desk article, I believe it says focusing on education, understanding and adoption of digital currencies. Um But basically paypal is focused on increasing consumer and merchant comprehension of cryptocurrencies, stable coins and central bank digital currencies while working closely with regulators as the industry evolves. So again, this is going to be a marketing tactic. In my personal opinion, they are working very closely with regulators and I think that what they're doing is they're going to get this stuff pushed through and they're going to make people think, oh, this is great. This is fantastic. This is going to help improve your quality of life. But really all it's doing is just making um United States of America, more of a nanny state. And I understand that banks and you know, paypal, whatever can go ahead and resend those transactions. But that's the whole reason why we Bitcoin is very appealing. Same with other crypto assets is once it, once you click that send and you confirm that money is gone and there's no way for merchant charge backs. Um There's no way for your assets to be taken just as long as you own your private, you know, you have your private seed phrase stored safely. So again, this is very worrisome to me. I don't like it, but I will grift and I will make money as ethically as possible with everybody else. Guys. Got history corner here. Yes, it's a really deep history corner for everyone. This, the whole thing that struck me here was like comparing tether which is offshore of the United States and then paypal and it's now a pack UD and the fact that we've done this in American history with our economic system for like about 200 plus years. Going back to like the founding fathers with Andrew Hamilton, where we essentially outlawed any sort of competition from over seas built systems internally and then set those systems out on a larger world and began to dominate. We've seen that in tons of times within like us, history with different industries, whether it be like railroads to the oil industry, to modern finance and now we're seeing the stable coins too, right? Where we banned tether from being able to inter painting, they were chased off seas in many different ways by so many different lawsuits and they're huge, right? $84 billion stable coin, the biggest stable coin out there. And then we sort of created these parameters for someone to build something within the United States that's going to be like rubber stamps by all the agencies that are in Washington. And now we're seeing that. So we're seeing the birth of like an American stable coin here uh much in the same way that US DC has tried to be, I think paypal can be even bigger because it already has the brand name and the fact it's on everyone's wallet uh or on the phone at this point. So that's my history point for you guys. It's been a little bit since I've done that. But I think this is, this is what did we get the founding fathers mentioned in there that we went all the way back to the founding fathers. We got to get Will on an American History podcast. I listened to that all day.